It is really cool that you found a way to use my ship to support Stephen Silver's 16 year old wave.

I did complete a c/7 width 19 gutter search with no ships found. I don't have the longest partial handy, but I believe it was about 100 rows. This means that the minimum width for c/7 gutter ships is 21, and a small example would be two reflected loafers.

In regards to c/4 ships I have run every search with knightt that completes in less than a few days. These are vast collections of ships, most of which a very large.

Muzik,

There are almost certainly 3c/7 ships that are findable in a reasonable length of time and half the size of the ship I posted. This will involve in running much longer odd symmetric width 25 searches which run 10 times slower than the width 23 search that ultimately found this ship.

I think it is entirely appropriate to split the spaceship section between elementary and engineered spaceships. I would characterize the elementary class as the strictly search oriented ships. This ship is definitely in the elementary class even though it is quite large. The key difference in my mind is that all engineered spaceships have the equivalent of an instruction tape that is read in order to continue the ship.

drc,

I have thought about how to construct a search program oriented towards finding a 3c/7 rake. It will be a while before I write up said search program. In the meantime getting lucky is the course to find one.

simsim314,

The total amount of cpu time invested in the path that actually found the ship was one or two months. I had other related and investigatory searches running in parallel.

As for a name, I was looking at the phase of the ship that I posted and it made me think of the "Spaghetti Monster". The very front looked like two eyes, and it is definitely trailed by a long jumble of spaghetti.

moebius wrote:I think it is entirely appropriate to split the spaceship section between elementary and engineered spaceships. I would characterize the elementary class as the strictly search oriented ships. This ship is definitely in the elementary class even though it is quite large. The key difference in my mind is that all engineered spaceships have the equivalent of an instruction tape that is read in order to continue the ship.

So corderships would be considered as elementary spaceships? That's pretty reassuring.

Anyway, dug up this old quote:

biggiemac wrote:It just makes me sad to think of a loafer or a tiny c/18 ship or something crashing into a blinker in the middle of a forgotten apgnano search..

Anyone up for searching for this hypothetical tiny c/18 ship (with a spaceship search program that does not let spaceships crash into blinkers)?

Late, but, congratulations! Many heads have been beaten against the wall to find a 3c/7 ship--it's only fitting that newer algorithms are the ones to finally find it. All possible speeds of spaceships with period ≤7 have now been found, with the exception of (2,1)/X knightships.

So, back on topic (how many times have I said that sentence? Yet another mystery of life.), has anyone seriously looked into a 3c/14 orthogonal using the pre-pulsar partial? I would put my money on there being a 3c/14 orthogonal with fewer than 250 live cells (problem is, being a lazy 14 year old I don't really have entirely that much money)

@Tim Coe:Would it be possible for you to narrow down the discovery dates of the c/4 orthogonal ships in this post and this post? Just the year would be sufficient. Currently, they're labeled as being discovered "between Dec 2015 and 19 Mar 2016" and "Between Dec 2015 and 21 Apr 2016" respectively.

muzik wrote:has anyone seriously looked into a 3c/14 orthogonal using the pre-pulsar partial?

It's a good place to start, but it will still probably be very difficult to find a 3c/14 ship. First, period-14 tends to be too high to search at directly. A search-width of 5 completes relatively quickly with zfind, but based on results at other speeds, we're not likely to find anything until we get to a search-width of 9, and that search will take much longer. Second, as the period goes up, the number of potential spaceship components seems to go down. Third, as the speed goes up, the number of potential spaceship components seems to go down. 3c/14 isn't very fast, but it's still faster than c/5. This could also reduce the probability of finding a spaceship.

So it might be possible to find a 3c/14 ship by using the pre-pulsar push to expand the reasonable search space, but you'll still need a bit of luck. Of course, I don't want to discourage anyone from exploring this idea. As we've seen recently, there could still be several small ships that are within our reach that we just haven't looked for yet.

muzik wrote:has anyone seriously looked into a 3c/14 orthogonal using the pre-pulsar partial?

It's a good place to start, but it will still probably be very difficult to find a 3c/14 ship. First, period-14 tends to be too high to search at directly. A search-width of 5 completes relatively quickly with zfind, but based on results at other speeds, we're not likely to find anything until we get to a search-width of 9, and that search will take much longer. Second, as the period goes up, the number of potential spaceship components seems to go down. Third, as the speed goes up, the number of potential spaceship components seems to go down. 3c/14 isn't very fast, but it's still faster than c/5. This could also reduce the probability of finding a spaceship.

So it might be possible to find a 3c/14 ship by using the pre-pulsar push to expand the reasonable search space, but you'll still need a bit of luck. Of course, I don't want to discourage anyone from exploring this idea. As we've seen recently, there could still be several small ships that are within our reach that we just haven't looked for yet.

It seems that things that are small enough to memorise how to build given a few minutes or so, but slow enough that they won't be seen escaping from soup, tend to be the best way to go. Copperhead of course is period 10 and kind of fragile (not really that much at the front and back), and loafer, a slightly earlier discovery, is even smaller and period 7. And similarly, we have the c/98 HighLife ship, which is pretty damn high period.

So searching for exotic speeds such as 3c/14 (which would actually lengthen some sort of chain, as we technically have 2c/14, 4c/14 and 6c/14) is probably our best bet. Since c/8 and c/9 have been quite thoroughly searched with no elementary spaceships popping up, we can tell that any ones of those speed are probably not going to be small. There are some really nice partials there though. Then there are some other potentially elementary speeds that don't seem to have been looked into like c/18 and c/67.

tl:dr c/98 is astronomically slow for such a small spaceship, which is unfortunately not in regular Life, so let's find an even weirder elementary speed which is in regular Life. Also I state the obvious too much

muzik wrote:has anyone seriously looked into a 3c/14 orthogonal using the pre-pulsar partial?

It's a good place to start, but it will still probably be very difficult to find a 3c/14 ship. First, period-14 tends to be too high to search at directly. A search-width of 5 completes relatively quickly with zfind, but based on results at other speeds, we're not likely to find anything until we get to a search-width of 9, and that search will take much longer. Second, as the period goes up, the number of potential spaceship components seems to go down. Third, as the speed goes up, the number of potential spaceship components seems to go down. 3c/14 isn't very fast, but it's still faster than c/5. This could also reduce the probability of finding a spaceship.

So it might be possible to find a 3c/14 ship by using the pre-pulsar push to expand the reasonable search space, but you'll still need a bit of luck. Of course, I don't want to discourage anyone from exploring this idea. As we've seen recently, there could still be several small ships that are within our reach that we just haven't looked for yet.

It seems that things that are small enough to memorise how to build given a few minutes or so, but slow enough that they won't be seen escaping from soup, tend to be the best way to go. Copperhead of course is period 10 and kind of fragile (not really that much at the front and back), and loafer, a slightly earlier discovery, is even smaller and period 7. And similarly, we have the c/98 HighLife ship, which is pretty damn high period.

So searching for exotic speeds such as 3c/14 (which would actually lengthen some sort of chain, as we technically have 2c/14, 4c/14 and 6c/14) is probably our best bet. Since c/8 and c/9 have been quite thoroughly searched with no elementary spaceships popping up, we can tell that any ones of those speed are probably not going to be small. There are some really nice partials there though. Then there are some other potentially elementary speeds that don't seem to have been looked into like c/18 and c/67.

tl:dr c/98 is astronomically slow for such a small spaceship, which is unfortunately not in regular Life, so let's find an even weirder elementary speed which is in regular Life. Also I state the obvious too much

I would like to say: don't lose hope. New searches are coming along and maybe that 3c/14 ship is right on the corner of the new search utilities. Currently, row-based searches look pretty impractical as Sokwe said, but if there is a ship small enough, I would say we could bet on coppersearch.

Scorbie wrote:I would like to say: don't lose hope. New searches are coming along and maybe that 3c/14 ship is right on the corner of the new search utilities. Currently, row-based searches look pretty impractical as Sokwe said, but if there is a ship small enough, I would say we could bet on coppersearch.

Just wanting to know, do different search programs have advantages over each other?

Also I was considering possibly using/getting a bunch of people to use apgsearch (symmetrical with an odd number of cells in between) and see if it pops out of there. It would be a boring process, but hey, Copperhead appeared from a symmetrical soup soon after its discovery. Even then, apgsearch maybe isn't our best bet.

Anyway, whichever search program is best. Everyone go ahead and start the search!

muzik wrote:Stupid question that's been floating about my head for a while, but could a 17c/45, 31c/240 or 23,5c/79 ship with <10000 cells exist?

I think yes, such a thing definitely should exist. What got the caterpillar kinds discovered first is that they were built from convenient puzzle pieces instead of discovered all at once. As soon as one gets big enough, I'm confident any possible speed of spaceship exists, but the huge number of possibilities are impossible to weed through. So, yes, but engineered spaceships are what we will be seeing instead for those high-periods and large cell counts.

Each could probably take some order of magnitude incremental improvement with more time spent engineering. The 'caterpillar's younger brother' thread has existed for a while but nobody explicitly made the improved ship.

I feel like the caterpillar's repetitive structure should make it possible to crimp down a bit and save on about 10000 or so cells, but that's most likely a trick of the eye.

Any ways, this thread should probably be renamed "Elementary Spaceship Discussion Thread" because it's mostly about elementary spaceships. There should also be an "Engineered Spaceship Discussion Thread" because there's a good few threads on engineered and engineerable spaceships.

who is disqualified from spaceshiphood by 2 cells. However, it was discovered in 2004, and I'm pretty sure we have more powerful searches these days. So maybe try running this through a search of some sort?

muzik wrote:"Engineered Spaceship Discussion Thread" because there's a good few threads on engineered and engineerable spaceships.

I worry that an "Engineered Spaceship Discussion Thread" would intertwine multiple complicated discussions, making them more difficult to follow.

muzik wrote:how about elementary knightships?

The spaceship search status page has information on the status of some of the completed searches for obliquely-traveling ships. In particular, Tim Coe searched for p6 knightships up to a "width" of 15 (see here). This only represents searches where the long dimension is the same as the 2-cell direction of travel. "Short" knightship searches have not been focused on as much. Another possibility is to run diagonal searches for knightships. I did a bit of this at p6 several years ago, but I can't find my notes on it. I think that I searched up to a diagonal width of 19 for a "long" spaceship and a diagonal width of 13 for a "short" spaceship.

Knightship searches at periods above 6 have not been explored as much. For all we know, it might actually be easier to find a p7 knightship.

The spaceship search status page has information on the status of some of the completed searches for obliquely-traveling ships. In particular, Tim Coe searched for p6 knightships up to a "width" of 15 (see here). This only represents searches where the long dimension is the same as the 2-cell direction of travel. "Short" knightship searches have not been focused on as much. Another possibility is to run diagonal searches for knightships. I did a bit of this at p6 several years ago, but I can't find my notes on it. I think that I searched up to a diagonal width of 19 for a "long" spaceship and a diagonal width of 13 for a "short" spaceship.

Knightship searches at periods above 6 have not been explored as much. For all we know, it might actually be easier to find a p7 knightship.

I barely understood any of that.

My understanding is that there are probably no 2,1c/6 knightwise ships that are less than 15 cells wide, and we haven't tapped into the realm of knightships with a restricted height. And you searched for knightships with a diagonal symmetry of some sort?

muzik wrote:My understanding is that there are probably no 2,1c/6 knightwise ships that are less than 15 cells wide

There are no (2,1)c/6 knightships that are less than or equal to 15 cells wide over all phases.

muzik wrote:we haven't tapped into the realm of knightships with a restricted height

I think I searched for "short" p6 knightships up to a height of 12 using WLS, but I might be misremembering. Such searches tend to take longer than the "long" knightship searches. Also, gfind-pt and knight2 are incapable of searching for "short" knightships.

muzik wrote:you searched for p6 knightships with a diagonal symmetry of some sort?

I searched for knightships with a diagonal shape. Unfortunately, I can't find any of my knightship partials, but here is a c/4 orthogonal ship to show the idea:

Gamedziner wrote:Is there any "small" (less than 1000 cells) means by which those two cells could be prevented from appearing, thus allowing a sort of flotilla knightship?

If something like that existed, it would have to move at the same speed as the knightship to keep doing its suppression work, and so it would be a very good candidate knightship on its own.

It might work to start a new search for a "support" ship that suppresses those two cells in the almost-knightship, and see if any solutions happen to come up for the different possible searchable shapes. I would expect that one or more people have already tried something along those lines, but I don't know for sure.